Taking values seriously for transformational climate change adaptation

Climate change is causing extensive and unprecedented impacts on individuals, societies, and ecosystems. Transformational efforts are increasingly advocated to overcome limits to climate change adaptation, but they can entail difficult and potentially disruptive decisions that depend on the goals that individuals and societies decide to pursue, and thus on the values they wish to prioritise, reconfigure or leave behind in response to radical changes. The call for transformational adaptation revives the impetus for placing values centre stage but also poses key challenges for adaptation research and practice. This perspective outlines three challenges for taking values seriously: understanding what values are, by acknowledging both their descriptive and normative dimensions; accounting for the multiplicity of value holders across space and time; and designing processes through which value conflicts are made explicit and can be legitimately resolved. We outline how ethics can help in determining the relation between what people find valuable and normatively well-grounded values; propose ‘value mapping’ exercises to elicit the values of actors involved in the adaptation process; and stress the potential of deliberative approaches in supporting efforts for more transformative adaptation. These challenges are exemplified through planned relocation, a radical and potentially transformative adaptation response. This paper outlines the distinction between descriptive and normative conceptions of values, a distinction often overlooked in environmental social sciences, and demonstrates its significance for addressing the multiplicity of values and conflicts in transformational adaptation. Rather than prescribing a definitive method for closing the gap between these descriptive and normative conceptions on values, it traces an initial pathway for integrating empirical and ethical perspectives and calls for renewed collaborations across the social sciences and humanities to advance values-based adaptation research and practice.